Background 

Fimatix were approached by a law firm client to carry out the Performance Testing of a large-scale HR & Finance transformation project to support over 7000 users, working with a mixture of on-premise, cloud based and vendor managed applications and application components.

The customer already had a small amount of Performance Testing capability in-house but had no real assets, infrastructure or processes that could be reused.

Scope

Performance risks were determined resulting in the build and execution of a performance test against the two most critical applications and multiple middleware components.

Approach

Fimatix had to define an approach for Performance Testing, which included defining infrastructure and defining a set of processes and testing tools that could be used for Performance Testing. The discovery phase looked at volumetrics, performance risks, architecture, and the degree of changes assessing different 12 application areas.

We used a combination of Apache JMeter and OpenText LoadRunner to write the scripts, working with both traditional HTTP(S) based web applications and Citrix-based applications, launched in tandem from an OpenText LoadRunner controller instance. Calls recorded in Apache JMeter needed to be contained within transaction controllers in order for the transactions within the Apache JMeter script to be reported within the OpenText LoadRunner Analysis tool.

Performance testing assets were set-up from scratch including processes, scripts, data and monitoring. Monitoring was set up in Azure and within physical and virtual servers to measure performance metrics such as CPU, Memory & I/O.

Numerous SQL queries were analysed and tuning changes were made during the testing phase alongside application changes to address performance issues

Challenges

i). LOCKED DOWN ENVIRONMENT – Secured locked down environment meant set-up for performance testing required strong management.

ii). IMMATURE APPLICATIONS – One of the biggest challenges was having to test relatively immature applications which were changing on a regular basis. Easily maintainable test scripts needed to be created in order to effect quick changes to performance test scripts in line with the development changes coming through and keep the performance testing on-track.

iii). MULTIPLE TOOLS – The best fit for this exercise was using Apache JMeter for web-based traffic, OpenText LoadRunner for Citrix-based traffic using a OpenText LoadRunner Controller to run the test and generate the traffic from the remote machines.

iv). TESTING RESPONSES FROM MULTIPLE GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATIONS – In order to provide analysis of response times from a number of different geographical areas, a number of remotely located workstations for generating the load needed to be set up as well as Azure virtual machines for Citrix-based performance testing.

Solutions

LoadRunner Enterprise can be partially or fully hosted on scalable Azure Kubernetes architecture with all of the cost and security benefits that come with a cloud based containerised solution.

Using OpenText supplied Docker images for LoadRunner load generators, hosts, database and controllers, along with a Docker image for the LoadRunner Enterprise server which underpins and utilises all these items, we applied these using a Kubernetes cluster running in Azure.

Outcome

The customer was able to go live on-schedule with their solutions with the confidence of a significantly improved user experience in terms of a more robust, performant application, along with the full handover of all test assets and instructions and guidance on how to run and how to maintain as part of their own internal testing process.

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